A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a large number of low-cost, low-power sensor nodes, which can perform sensing, simple computation, and wireless communication over shod distance. With the increasing demand of applications, many new solutions for WSN have been proposed. Accurate evaluation for the performance of both new solutions and exist solutions is significant and necessary. So far, most of the evaluation is carried out by means of mathematical analysis or simulation. However, evaluation for the performance experimentally in a physical environment using real-life devices will be more convincing. However, a universal performance evaluation platform for WSNs does not exist.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,295,183 (“U.S. 183”) discloses a method and system to monitor the status and behavior of a WSN. This system aims to monitor and influence the behavior and status of WSN, by means of the state messages sent wirelessly from the operational nodes to the monitoring nodes. A disadvantage of this system is that the operational node needs to be added with an additional function which is used to provide the state message to the monitor node. As such, the system of U.S. 183 is not a universal performance evaluation platform for WSN. In addition, send the state messages will cost extra power consumption of the operational nodes and communication resource (such as bandwidth and time) of the whole network. Moreover, adding of this additional function requires extra efforts from users or vendors of the operational WSNs which is monitored by this patented system. This inserted additional function could potentially influence or damage operation of their WSN. Therefore, this patent method and system have limited practicability and acceptance for most of WSNs, especially for existing WSNs.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,165,833 provides a system for evaluating a traffic performance in a tree type multi-hop wireless network of a CSMA/CA method. A major limitation of this patent is aimed for tree type multi-hop wireless networks with CSMA/CA access control method. Another limitation is that only traffic performance can be evaluated.